The Summer Town
by nimmieamee
Summary: 1939. Howard Stark, the summer, and an agent of the atomic arms race.


Howard Stark had left Gramercy Park – the site of his birth and upbringing – some time before 1939.

The leaving process began at eleven. At eleven he'd gone with his father to a beautiful bank with a gold ceiling on Fifth Avenue and inquired about certain inheritances and money held in trust. He'd been permitted fifty dollars, three of which he'd invested, and forty-seven of which he'd used for tools to take apart a telephone and a bicycle, and to buy fireworks. And at the end of the day certain walls in Gramercy Park were soggy in places and scorched in others. He'd accomplished nothing. He was not quite the genius his son would be. But this was the beginning.

The stock market turned the three dollars into thirty in short time. But in 1929, for his thirteenth birthday, Howard resolved to investigate certain fuses. He became properly obsessed with putting them inside small mechanical contraptions – little men formed out of the spare parts the chauffer would give him. His father cautioned against selling his stock purely to purchase bursting chemicals and wires, but heedless Howard sold anyway. And within months he'd invented a quick bursting fuse that he trapped in a small cabinet (so as to save the garden walls). He sat in the garden and watched it go off, a contained explosion, danger finally under the command of man. He was perfectly happy in that moment. Several blocks to the South, men were killing themselves. He had no idea. He'd made thirty dollars and now, with his small experiment a success, he felt sure that he would make more.

He never once thought of the suicide men, not really. How could he have? He was thirteen. And their deaths were not connected to him. No fault could be laid at his door.

At St. Paul's Howard continued this business of detonations and discharges. He was almost sent down for it (well, for that and skipping his Greek poetry lessons), except that he was the special pet of the science department and his work won the school several awards. This work: a time-setting device for his fuses. An inscrutable system involving wavelengths and communications. New ways to channel radiation. A method of cooling car interiors. It took until his third year before he made or did anything with his discoveries – for a time, they were notations in professorial letters and elaborate diagrams displayed on wooden tables in the hallways outside the classrooms. But by his first year at New Haven he had his own laboratory. And, ten years after his explosion in the garden, he was driving away, away from Gramercy Park and down through Queens, and into the wilds of Long Island, to a fabled and faraway summer town:

Jones Beach.

It was spring. The last day of spring, to be precise. But Jones Beach was ahead of schedule. Here it had been summer for some time. The breezy island sat sunning itself, a slim little sandbar, all done up in a summer swim suit of sea grasses. It was marked by a tall tower, stretching high over all the sands, welcoming and imposing all at once, a sentinel at the end of the road. The tower was red brick gone brown and tan in the sun, summer-fied. Howard was not in summer colors yet. He did not match the powerful tower. He matched the sky, almost; his jacket had once been Yale blue, but had been bleached, very much altered, in a surprising lab accident. But Howard had not been bleached or altered, thankfully. Only the jacket. Howard was perfectly safe. Whole, with gleaming teeth and modish polarized sunglasses, on the last day of spring.

The smart Jones Beach attendant met him near the tower and directed him to a spot near the East bathhouse. Howard nodded mechanically, only half-listening, and pulled the car around, and when he passed the tower the sun glinted off of its top and hit his sunglasses and bounced off the mirror and settled in his pitch black hair. It was very hot. Under the jacket he was all in summer white, but it was still hot. After he parked the car, he retrieved an old-fashioned boater from beneath the passenger seat: white and Yale blue. He lodged it on his head, only polite to wear a hat in 1939, but he was not doing it to be polite, only to stave off the sun. He walked to the boardwalk. Winds blew up across the sand and whirled around the tower and they hit Howard, and he was obliged to hold onto his boater with one hand to keep it from flying off.

There were ice cream stands and beautiful ice cream girls sitting in them, with their hair done in brown chocolate coils and swirls. Howard nodded at them. There were small blue and white houses where the sand met the boardwalk. Out of these came girls with sand blonde hair in blue swimsuits, clutching their pretty white Cuban-heeled sandals, their white skin browning politely in deference to the sun. Howard nodded at them. He passed the beach stop and the bandstand, small and neat and deco both, with red brick in places, and small neat girls with reddish hair were dancing and laughing, and he nodded to them as well. He nodded amiably, mechanically, all over Jones Beach. The girls playing tennis served up smiles. The girls playing shuffleboard by the sand slid looks his way. The girls skating on the weathered brown planks skated past him, then did a loop the loop, and skated back the other way, wheeling around and around to catch sight of the blue and white spring man, in his old-fashioned boater, whole and handsome.

Morals were relaxed in the summer places.

At the West bathhouse they were having a party. It was grand little building, suited to parties. On the lower level, men collected under the national flag. Children ran happily from the cold outdoor swimming pools to the nice indoor heated ones. Women sipped milkshakes on the terrace. Several women – very bold; entrenched in their places before the bathhouse, not sliding or wheeling past – said hello. Howard said hello back. He admired the curves of them, set against the straight deco details of the terrace. They were beautifully balanced. They made Howard think of airplanes. All of Jones Beach made Howard think of other things. The sand he considered on an elemental level. The sun recalled wavelengths and energy. The girls might have held secret, enticing fuses inside them.

Howard knew the secret of Jones Beach, its history; he knew it had greater dimension than the average summer town. Jones Beach had long been sunk beneath the ocean, ceded to nature, but modern thinking had raised the whole area above water level and then anchored it in place with sea grasses. It had all the appearance of a natural summer town. But it was not. Deep underneath, it was a technology town. Howard admired this. And to look at him, he was so pleased that he was like a little clockwork man in a little clockwork display. Nodding, smiling, nodding. And around him little clockwork figures responded – the whole scene seemed to have sprung to life at the turn of a key.

He took the steps to the upper level two at a time, not a New Haven young man in that moment but a St. Paul's boy. The people on the steps were in a similar state, young and giddy. They made laughing, supportive comments. One fellow tipped his hat to Howard and Howard doffed the boater in response. The attendant at the top of the stairs held the door open. Howard went right in.

He knew many of the people inside – why would he be there if he didn't know them? They were straight and tall and clear-eyed people, who had, like the beach, decided to indulge in summer a little early. They wore whites and blues and sea grass greens; their feet were in boating shoes or shiny brown leather moccasins or Cuban heels; they smoked and ejected a wonderful burning summer fragrance that mingled with the cool smell of the sea; they listened with only half an ear to the brassy summer music and spoke in firm, well-modulated voices.

"Hello, Stark! Hear you've got a hangar out in Queens now? Good God, what must that be? Thirty a week?"

"Heard you were out in California, Howie. Rumor's that you're starting your own company? Any truth to it, How?"

"Mr. Stark, what's this we're hearing about MIT? Courting you, are they?"

"Oh, How, there you are! Verna told me you were down at Princeton last weekend to meet Max, and so was I, but I didn't see you there, darling. I'm sorry for it."

Howard said hello to the ones he knew least and nodded amiably at the ones he knew best. He eyed the long wooden counter on one side of the room. Behind it stood girls in white blouses and pale blue skirts, offering up potato salad, peaches and cream, iced coffee and tea and chocolate, lima beans, beef on toast, corn soup, blueberry pudding, lamb and lemon sandwiches, creamed carrots, fruit gelatin, shrimp aspic with dressing, sunshine cake, buttered beets, orange sodas – all the summer food that anyone could desire. After Howard had taken stock of the room and said hello, heard endless variations on his name – Stark, How, Howie, Howser – and after he had assessed the entire mechanical tableau of it all, all those people feeding back what they had heard from here or there, their feet making endless rotations of the room, trying to find all the ones they knew best, politely wired to say the biggest hellos to the ones they knew least—after all this, Howard went to the counter for food. It was a perfect factory line there at the counter. Every girl at a station, and one station to every girl. A strawberry blonde handled the plates, never missing a single pair of hands: silverware administered in a manner uninfluenced by will or human emotion.

"Hello, working here long?" Howard said. The man behind him chuckled. Howard shrugged. He said to the man, in an undertone, "It's good to be polite to the people who serve you." And the man in front of him nodded and called Howard a no bones about it genuine American, yes sir, with an open heart to go with his business sense.

"Do you mean with the catering company?" said the girl.

Howard nodded, already looking at the next girl in line.

"About seven months," said the girl. Howard nodded again. He moved onto the first course: potato salad. Potato Salad had been working two months. Lima Beans a whole year and a half. Creamed Carrots wouldn't answer; she only smiled and gave Howard slightly more carrots than the man in front received. Lamb Sandwiches was a veteran catering girl of seven months' standing. Shrimp Aspic was new, just hired last week. Buttered Beets had been here four months. The desserts were all recent hires, and so was Orange Soda, whose offerings Howard politely declined.

"I prefer coffee," he told Orange Soda, and turned to meet the all-purpose drinks girl, black-haired, her station neat and orderly, not a single drop of spilled coffee or tea or chocolate anywhere. She handled the cups, too, double the work most of the other girls had, and she handled them like cups were her whole business and purpose in life, nothing but coffee cups – serving them, pouring into them, holding them aloft.

"Hello, working here long?" Howard said politely.

"Oh, no, I've never once been to this beach before," said the girl. She had a very crisp voice, almost wintry, at odds with the room and the beach and the last day of spring.

"Do you like it?" Howard said.

"I can't say I've seen it," said the girl. "Coffee, tea, chocolate?"

"Coffee," Howard said. "Coffee, coffee. Milk, no sugar. I was traveling recently, myself. Hadn't seen this place in years. You should take a look around when you're done here. It's a great beach."

"Oh, I don't think there will be time. Where did you travel?" the girl said. She suddenly seemed to lose sight of where she had put her cups. It was almost tragic. She had been so good with them before.

Howard chuckled. "Nowhere glamorous. Business places. Most recently I was down in New Jersey."

"My uncle wants to move there," the girl said, now suddenly finding it difficult to locate the coffee. This was understandable. Coffee, tea, chocolate. So much to handle.

"Older man?" Howard said. "Jersey gets a bad rap, but I've older friends down there and they like it."

He considered these friends now. Some of them had names that began with 'Rosen' or ended in '-stein. They wore dowdy sweaters and drank coffee out of old mugs, and they spoke with heavy accents. With most persons it was all loud hellos and amiable nodding on the outside, so that one assumed they were more than just atomic bits reacting to things on the inside. But these men were honest. They were protons, neutrons, and electrons on the inside and protons, neutrons, and electrons on the outside: it was all that interested them. The atoms. The atoms.

Very small things, they had told Howard confidently, held the key to making very big explosions.

"I've often thought so myself," Howard had said to them then.

"We are in the process of writing the president a letter about it," one had said, the one with the thick glasses.

"Well, that's one way to get your name out there," Howard had said. "I like to take it right to the American people, right to the market, myself."

"We'd like to," the one with the wild hair had said. "We'd like to. But someone is already buying this idea. This and others. How to destroy the world in an instant. How to marry man—and machine! How to change the very structure of man – to improve him beyond measure, they say. As though he could still be called a man!"

By now the girl had found the coffee. She poured it out for Howard, an effortless, practiced, mechanical movement. She attached a napkin to the thing somehow, quickly, neatly, folding it so that it sat perfectly alongside the cup in her hand. She held it aloft, finishing her assigned task, and Howard went to take it, and then somehow, by some ill-timing on someone's part, her arm collided with the front of Howard's old bleached Yale jacket.

A half-second of calamity. The man in front of Howard could have sworn that the girl had mishandled the business. Her arm had swept up just a little too quickly, as though aiming for poor young How Stark. And the man behind Howard believed with utter certainty that it was Howard's fault. He'd leaned forward very senselessly and caught the arm as it was coming up. Either way, the jacket was ruined. The girl apologized, the head caterer came over to berate her; and Howard stood off to the side, food abandoned, and shrugged off his jacket, and asked for water to blot out some of the stain before it set.

"Oh, I'll get it for you," said the girl. "It's right off the main room here. Just give me the jacket."

The head caterer told her to see that she did this well. Howard said, "No, no, let me come along. It's—you've got to handle the lining right on this old thing. I'll come with you. I'll come with you."

And in short time they had both left the main room and gone down a small corridor, and where the hall split into two directions Howard led the girl down the darker way, away from the kitchen or the toilets, and up a small flight of stairs, and around a hidden bend and then up a small safety ladder.

"It's this way," he said in a low, tight voice. "You wouldn't believe what I had to promise the Parks Commissioner to get a look at the building plans."

"Did he also agree to empty the halls, just so that we might not beoverheard?" said the girl.

Howard made a wry face, but kept quiet after that, until they were on the roof of one of the bathhouse towers.

They were alone there. They stood against the sea-green spiral dome, silhouetted in the sun, and they crouched low behind the brick masonry, not so low they couldn't see over it, but not high enough to be seen. It was the last day of spring, but summer had come early and so the sun was overpowering. When the sun hit the drinks girl, it turned her black hair a rich brown. She looked back the way they'd come and then down at all the bathhouse below, scouting. From here they could see all around: the people joyfully shouting and playing paddle games, the shrieking children in the pools, the yellow and blue and striped terrace umbrellas, the sea grasses that grew in bunches all the way back to the main tower, the sandy girls sunning themselves, the large stretch of white that met the pounding Yale blue surf. This was Jones Beach, the summer town. And it was 1939, and Howard not yet twenty-two, and now, ahead of schedule, he was leaving the spring of his life – New Haven and St. Paul's – and entering the summer.

He was meeting a genuine agent of the atomic arms race.

"You think Germany will beat us to it," he'd told the old men down in Princeton. "But how? You're all over here."

"There are others," one had replied. And then he'd said a word that Howard did not connect to anything, because he'd only ever heard it in ancient poetic stanzas at St. Paul's. He'd said:HYDRA. This word would burrow itself into Howard someday and make him hastily pick up the phone, hands shaking, as he hit on the last great idea of his life. But Howard did not know that in 1939.

"If he did want to go to New Jersey," Howard told the drinks girl now. "Your uncle. The Institute for Advanced Study has a place for him."

"I'll be sure to pass that along," the girl said. "He's said he's not making bombs."

"I didn't—" Howard began.

"You didn't have to," the girl said firmly.

She was very pretty, the drinks girl. She was all wrong for Jones beach – she was hidden under that serviceable blouse, not done up in her summer best; and she had no hint of summer pink or tan about her. All wintry brown in places, with autumn-red lips. Not this season's model. Not this nation's model, either. Up on the roof, her voice had changed. It was warmer, her consonants no longer wintry and perfectly crisp. It was also English. Howard was surprised, and then surprised that he could be surprised. Of course it was English.

"Your plans, Mr. Stark," said the girl.

In front of them, the national flag flapped in the breeze. It captured Howard's attention for a moment. It had flapped in outside his window in Gramercy Park, at seasonally-appropriate times, to celebrate Independence Day and Grant's birthday and the arrival of important political persons to the town. It had flapped at St. Paul's as he'd hurried across the lawns, late for Greek Poetry. It had flapped at New Haven, and it flapped – in miniature – tucked next to the mirror of his car.

Howard was of course a patriot. But suddenly the flag made no sense to him. He could break apart the sun, the sea, the girls, and replace them all with his true passion, his religion: the snapping into place of pipes and tubes and things, the whir of a motor, the look of wheels powered by some invisible hand.

But the flag seemed very unbreakable, very unfamiliar and condemning all of a sudden. The stripes – what could they mean? The stars: inscrutable pinpricks. Under the watchful flag, Howard felt, for the first time in his life, off-kilter. Howard, who made money out of experiments and experiments out of money. Who had been the special pet of the science department. Who'd never once thought of the suicide men.

"Mr. Stark, you have something for me," the girl said.

Howard swallowed hard.

"Right, right," he said. And from his pocket he produced a pen, and a small notebook like the kind anyone might buy for two cents. Completely ordinary. Not unique to him. The pen, too, was the cheapest and most common of its kind. He pressed the notebook up against the masonry and began to work. A little slower than usual. He was using his left hand, and his words and numbers and symbols came out unfamiliar even to him. He never used his left hand for this.

"You're putting it together here?" the girl said, aghast.

"Of course," said Howard. "I can't keep these things on paper. Anyone could connect me to them. And, anyway, they're up here all the time." He tapped his forehead with his pen, then resumed diagramming.

"We don't have much time," the girl said, "And surely you'd suffer less than your associates, if someone were to stumble on your involvement. It's why you were chosen, after all—"

"I was chosen because I volunteered," Howard said, pausing his work to look at her, almost offended.

He wondered if she were English at all. Perhaps this, too, was a cover, a ruse. Perhaps she wasn't British Intelligence through and through, but something far more sinister, an agent put in place by the Soviets. She seemed to come from the winter places, she seemed to have secrets buried inside her, her pale face a kind of concealing snow drift. And, under the watchful eye of the flag, Howard was handing her an idea that by all rights should have gone direct to his own government, his own nation. That he had the tacit approval of certain curious generals was not much comfort. He had been raised in the leadership places – in Gramercy Park, at St. Paul's, at Yale – and now he felt for the first time a horrible sense of responsibility not to a flag or a government but topeople. The little beings below, not mechanical at all, but flesh and blood. They had no idea that, far above them, Howard Stark was passing along a terrible new idea, a fuse. Trapped on the confines of the page, wrapped up in all this secrecy, so that when it was detonated the explosion might be contained, might not destroy too much.

"Your uncle," Howard said, as he worked. "Have you seen him lately?"

"You don't know," the girl said. It was a question and it wasn't.

"You can obviously communicate with him—"

"The same way we communicate with you, Mr. Stark," said the girl. "Only with him it's much more difficult. He's not quite with us yet. Last month he was required to attend a speech before the Reichstag."

Howard put the pen down. "I'm working to liberate a card-carryingNazi—"

"It wasn't by choice, Mr. Stark," said the girl firmly. "They have a handle on him. They have his wife, his daughter, his father-in-law. Family. Human beings, so to them they're quite valueless."

"But is he making bombs forthem?" Howard said, with some bite in his voice.

"No," she said, and her voice went winter-cold and Howard saw her not as a girl but instead as a person around his age, someone on the last day of her spring, perhaps. She said, apropos of nothing, "Do you know what they want, what HYDRA wants to know?"

"How to destroy the world in an instant," Howard said, well-aware that he was giving up information, and shouldn't be. But he was a St. Paul's boy, not a spy. He wasn't good at this kind of thing.

"So that they can remake it in their image," said the young woman, trading some information back his way. Howard felt comforted. He sunk the new information deep within, and continued.

"How to—to give a man all the perfect efficiency and predictability of a machine," he said.

"That's what you're doing," said the woman. "And in exchange for it, once he's out, we deliver him to you, Mr. Stark. To your shores."

Well. Howard had to take that on faith. But he pressed on anyway, because something had occurred to him, "I suppose they say they want to improve man, but keep his essence, keep him human. Because a superman's no good if he's just a monster, but—"

"That's what our good doctor is working on right this moment," the woman said. "That's it."

"—but isn't it the same thing as their second objective?" Howard said. "I mean, they want a man as orderly and regular as a machine. That's their Superman. And—"

"Yes," the woman said simply. "They don't see the difference. Zola, the second doctor – he thinks like that. But you promised us a working that would do the opposite, didn't you? So prove him wrong, please, Mr. Stark."

She'd neatly brought him back to his work. Howard looked at her, nodded. He focused on the sketchbook. He plotted it out right then and there, under the blazing hot sun. It was a simple method, all about temperatures and elements, staving off human warmth; no one would ever suspect it had been sketched out there in the summer town. It was Howard Stark's patented cooling system. It was a surefire way to make a man greater, longer-lived, static and perfect and contained – only, of course, for a period he wouldn't be a man at all.

He'd be a summer popsicle, really.

"It'll only work if you have the parts—"

"We'll get the parts," said the woman.

"And you'll have to make it convincing. I mean, you freeze him in my little cabinet, and he seems to be dead, but then you have to take him out while he still looks dead, and they'll want to know why he's so cold—"

"We'll make it convincing," said the woman.

"And once you put him back in it'll take for about three hours,ifyou've got the batteries I specify, and you'll have to fit them into the coffin, so even that's a generous—"

"We'll say two and half hours, and that'll have to be enough," said the woman.

"Right," said Howard. He realized, very suddenly, that he was done. It was all there. Numerals, symbols, helpful diagrams. The notebook had sapped them all up, soaked them out of him; he'd sweated out the most hare-brained, the hugest idea of his life. He felt exhausted. His eyes burned in the sun; he'd completely forgotten to put on his hat and modish sunglasses when he'd come up here.

He handed his companion the notebook. The flag waved condemningly at him as he did it. None of the people down there knew what was going on. But theycouldn't. And it was for the best; it had to be.

"You don't think they'll figure it out?" Howard said. "HYDRA, I mean. Once it's pulled off. You don't think they'll have the information, my ideas? I've just given them all to you. And—"

"Usually you prefer to make a profit on them?" she said, with some bite in her voice.

Howard scowled at her. "Once you have my work, any Soviet connections working on this with us might have it, too, and I don't trust them. And once it's pulled off, and he's obviously over here with us, HYDRA might be able to hit on it themselves and reverse-engineer it. It's got nothing to do with profit, Ms.—Ms…."

She raised an eyebrow. She did not offer a name.

" ," Howard said snappishly. "It's got nothing to do with profit. It's the fact that—that—"

He looked at the flag. He realized something for the first time in his life, as he spoke.

"Everything I make can be turned to evil, you know," he said slowly. "But I've got to make it. And try to make it good. I've got totry. I—it's what I'm good at. It's what I've always done." He trailed off.

The spring of his life ended, just then, in 1939.

The young woman looked at him and blinked her winter-dark eyes, and it was like she'd been turned off and then on again: reset. When he stared at her now, there was a summer softness to her. There was something like doubt lurking beneath her skin.

She confessed, "I thought the same thing. But they think it's worth it, you know. That's why they wanted you on this. You found a way to give a man freedom, prolong his life, even. By granting him a temporary death, by making him useless and weak. That's extraordinary, Mr. Stark. That's the opposite of how HYDRA thinks. It's chaotic, it's insensible. It's brilliant, and completely against their work – they think in orderly straight lines compared to you. So we're hoping they won't latch onto it. But we have no way of knowing."

Howard exhaled hard. This was, he felt, an honest answer.

"You've got to tell them my concerns," he said. "Whoever does the mission, I mean."

She looked down. "I'm hoping it'll be me," she said.

This seemed very personal, very genuine. Howard wasn't sure he deserved to hear it. But he was glad she'd told him. It was like she'd offered it back to him in exchange for baring his fears. He'd peeled back his skin. Now so had she.

"You'd be a good choice," Howard said.

His companion smiled. It was small and private, very beautiful.

"Let's go back in," she said. "Before they start to miss you."

And in they went, back down to meet the summer. But after this Howard was no longer a carefree creature of the summer town, a being with no responsibility, no fault at his door. In his mind, he had already left Jones Beach. The leaving process had begun.

* * *

(They did reverse-engineer it. His cryofreeze chamber. They reverse-engineered it, and improved on it, and then they found James Barnes, and they used it.)

* * *

Thanks to Dayadhvam for help with the dialogue. I don't actually know that the dialogue here is quite right, but that's v. much on me. What does work works because I had help.


End file.
